VNX Weekend Read: Feb 25 – March 1 Issue

March 1, 2019

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Happy first day of spring, dear VNX Weekend Readers! This week we have decided to mix things up a bit. The new season has brought a whiff of change in alternative investments and some good news for VCs. It’s great for our community and the future of our platform. We have chosen to offer tokenized VC portfolios for trading on our platform because this could truly be a market changer: it’ll both bring in a broader pool of investors and unlock liquidity for VCs. Venture capital funds are seeing higher returns and traditional financial institutions become more receptive towards innovative investment instruments. This is truly cause for optimism. Read on.

Top of Mind

Individual deal announcements may not always offer overarching insights into how the financial world operates and where it is headed. But we beg to differ.

This week YieldStreet, a 3.5-year-old, New York-based alternative investment platform that focuses on real estate, shipping, commercial loans, has raised $62 million in Series B funding from several venture capital funds and a family office. These investment opportunities have previously been limited to institutional investors. But emerging startups like YieldStreet are changing that and opening up a conversation about a new financial future.

At VNX Exchange we strive to do exactly that! We offer a radically new digital asset class for trading on our platform. VNX tokenizes VC portfolios and opens them to the whole world. Investing into the next Uber or Airbnb is now within reach and it is great that other areas open up for investment in new ways as well.

The fact that other fintech startups not only join in on this dialogue but also raise significant amounts of cash to back their ideas gives us confidence in that we are on the right track. It is only a matter of time before financial markets and investors fully open up to this new opportunity.

What’s Hot

This week Julius Baer, one of the largest Swiss banks, partneredwith a crypto bank startup known as Seba Crypto to offer its clients digital asset storage, transactions and investment opportunities.

This is a yet another indication of a shifting financial landscape. We are going to see more and more traditional players veer into the digital asset space.

You can tokenize, or digitize, a bar stool or a cat, but it does not mean that this cat in a hat will offer investors an opportunity to put their money into safe and solid assets. It is only when these instruments are backed by tangible assets like VC portfolios when they become safe, regulated and promise to yield substantial returns.

Newsworthy

Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel who has risen to prominence after co-founding PayPal and Palantir Technologies, has produced outsize returns for its investors, writes the Wall Street Journal. According to the report, the fund has more than quadrupled the value of every dollar it had invested from its 2011-vintage fund. This is substantially above the industry average with funds normally roughly doubling their returns, WSJ writes. Thiel’s funds that bagan investing in 2005 and 2007 have seen even higher returns. This goes to show that tokenizing VC portfolios could offer a promising new alternative investment opportunity for a broad pool of institutional and retail investors.

Weekend Read

This week we bring you something a bit more serious. If you stop for a second and consider the massive impact technology is having on your daily life, you may wonder where all of this is going. Adam Lashinsky at Fortune argues that things are heading undoubtedly towards increased regulation of major technology behemoths, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and others. The idea of creating one digital regulator for these companies is gaining popularity in both Europe and the US, he writes. This increased oversight does not need to spell censorship but could be a positive force for the tech industry and consumers according to some experts.

“[T]here’s an air of inevitability about regulation. It is becoming a question of when, not if,” he concludes.

VNX Weekend Read has been curated by the VNX Exchange Head of Content Olga Razumovskaya.

Disclaimer: This news digest does not represent the position of the VNX Exchange management and is not meant to serve as a forecast.

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